THE RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF METHODIST TICKETS, AND ASSOCIATED PRACTICES OF COLLECTING AND RECOLLECTING, 1741-2017

Among all the paper ephemera surviving from eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain, the humble Methodist ticket has attracted little attention from scholars and collectors. Issued quarterly to members as a testimonial to religious conduct, many still exist, reflecting the sheer quantity produced by 1850, and the significance of keeping practices, where Methodist habits were distinctive. This article explores first the origin and spread of tickets primarily within British Methodism, but also noting its trans-oceanic contexts. Apparently inconsequential objects, they shaped experience and knowledge, illuminating eighteenth-century religious life, female participation, and plebeian agency. Discussion then turns to patterns of saving and memorialization that from the 1740s preserved Methodists’ tickets. Such practices extended the life-cycle of the individual ticket and created the accidents of its survival, giving it new uses as an institutional resource. In recovering the dead, it acquired nostalgic value, but other capacities were lost and forgotten. The ticket’s origins, uses, and preservation intersect with major historical and historiographical currents to complicate established narratives of print, urban association, and commerce, and to present alternative understandings of collecting.Peer reviewe

Branding sustainability : opportunity and risk behind a brand-based approach to sustainable markets

ephemera works with a Creative Commons Licence, which allows others to copy, distribute and transmit the work, so long as the work is attributed to the author(s). It allows non-commercial use of the work, but it does not allow others to alter, transform or build upon the work. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/In this article we discuss the role of brands in the creation of sustainable markets. We focus on the the increasing importance of ethical branding and how it might help to overcome some institutional shortcomings inherent in current marketing settings. We also discuss the increasing influence of brand communities and the seeming potential for a 'democratisation' of brand value and values. Brands are in this article described as one practical and effective way forward to develop the market for sustainable products further. We illustrate this from examples in food retailing, showing how companies have already started to follow this logic.At the same time this article raises doubts over the long-term effectiveness of a (purely) brand-focused approach to sustainable market exchange. On the one hand we claim that brands have proven receptive to public top-down (ie policy makers) and bottom-up (ie social movements)pressure. For intensive public scrutiny has resulted in markets developing in line with public interests. Yet, on the other hand, we raise concerns over brands' increasing dominance. Dominance, that is, over the exchange process of sustainable products and services; also over the societal discourse in which sustainability is continuously made sense of. We conclude with an attempt to provide a more nuanced view on brands. We acknowledge their effectiveness in 'bringing sustainable products to life', but also stress the risk of brands achieving discursive dominance over the (democratically legitimized) public debate. For this undermines societal efforts to 'green' marketsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

The Passing of Print

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialization of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies – scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them – and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive

Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination: Making Sense of Work and Industrial Change

Following recent calls for a more self-aware and historically-sensitive sociology this article reflects on the concept of deindustrialisation and industrial change in this spirit. Using E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of The English Working Class and his examination of industrialising culture with its stress on experience, the article asks how these insights might be of value in understanding contemporary processes of deindustrialisation and work. Drawing on a range of sociological, cultural and literary studies writers it conceptualises the differences and similarities between two historic moments of industrial change and loss. In particular it draws on the literary concept of the ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’ to explore these periods. The paper has important implications for how we think about contemporary and historical industrial decline

Thick as Trees: Kinship and Place in Transatlantic Small Press Poetry Networks

Cet article examine le rôle que jouent les maisons d’édition de poésie dans le travail et la réception de plusieurs poètes américains, écossais et britanniques : Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Roy Fisher et Stuart Mills. Malgré la distance géographique qui sépare ces auteurs, ceux-ci partagent néanmoins les espaces sociaux et utopiques des publications et des petites revues dans lesquelles ils ont été publiés ou édités. L’exemple paradigmatique de la maison d’édition Jargon Society de Jonathan Williams illustre ces liens littéraires qui esquissent la constitution d’un canon ou d’une tradition. L’objectif de cet article est de démontrer comment les réseaux de petites maisons d’édition dans les années 1960 et 1970 ont non seulement fourni des plateformes essentielles pour la diffusion et le partage des œuvres poétiques, mais ont aussi offert les moyens de formuler une critique de la condition géographique en façonnant une “société” transatlantique socialement plus inclusive pour poètes, artistes et éditeurs

Special Libraries, February 1947

Volume 38, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1947/1001/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, February 1947

Volume 38, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1947/1001/thumbnail.jp

It’s not all about the music:online fan communities and collecting Hard Rock Café pins

Previous studies of music fan culture have largely centered on the diverse range of subcultures devoted to particular genres, groups, and stars. Where studies have moved beyond the actual music and examined the fashion, concerts, and collecting ephemera such as vinyl records and posters, they have tended to remain closely allied to notions of subcultural distinction, emphasizing hierarchies of taste. This paper shifts the focus in music fan studies beyond the appreciation of the music and discusses the popular fan practice of collecting souvenir pins produced and sold by the Hard Rock Café (HRC) within a framework of fan tourism. Traveling to and collecting unique pins from locations across the globe creates a fan dialogue that centers on tourism and the collecting practices associated with souvenir consumption. Collectors engage in practices such as blogging, travel writing, and administration that become important indicators of their particular expression of fandom: pin collecting. Membership requires both time and money; recording visits around the world and collecting unique pins from every café builds fans' cultural capital. This indicates an internationalization of popular fandom, with the Internet acting as a connective virtual space between local and national, personal and public physical space. The study of HRC pin collecting and its fan community suggests that HRC enthusiasts are not so because they enjoy rock music or follow any particular artist but due to the physical ephemera that they collect and the places and spaces they visit

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship